Abstract
The article addresses the subject of primitivism in twentieth-century Western art from Matisse to Frans Kline. Writing from an anthropological perspective, the author starts with a critical discussion of received notions of primitivism as proposed by the art historians Goldwater(1938) and Rubin (1984). Arguing that primitivism goes beyond the issue of formal or iconographic borrowing, Severi proposes that primitivism be understood as a “morphology of cultural exchange.” Drawing on a range of theoretical writings, such as Carl Einstein on African art, Pavel Florensky on icon painting, and Barnett Newman on abstract art, the author examines primitivism in relation to complex issues of space and visual perception. In conclusion, the relationship between Western and non-Western art is a dialectic between what is given in the image and that which is marked as its invisible part. It is through visual plays with “empathy” as a means for intensifying the image that the primitive becomes, in the eye of the avant-gardes, the ancestor of the modern.
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